This whole Obama-FISA thing has really got me thinking about politics and government lately. While I've both engaged, and been engaged in more conversations about politics this election cycle, that might simply be a skewing due to getting older and other external factors. Recently, I've really sat down and thought about politics - in sharp contrast to just yammering on about it - and I realize that it's a very difficult thing to speak about clearly and logically; an election where emotion and speculation did not enter into it has never existed.
And of course this is true of political discourse, as well, down to the citizen-on-citizen debating that goes on in every pub, restaurant, and alleyway. Here is the crux of the problem. While there is a certain intuition that emotion and feeling give us, I could argue that there must be a better system in which roughly 50% of the population is pit against the other 50%, doomed to forever be diametrically opposed.
Mediation has come a long way in recent years, from peer-based high school groups organized to deal with conflicts among students to small claims court, where it can often be a much better solution for both parties involved. This is an approach of compromise, not of win-or-lose. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here for politics?
Now, I understand that the judiciary serves this purpose in some fashion, but I'm talking about a more hands-on approach. If you took a defendant and claimant from small claims court and put them in a room by themselves, you would probably not expect a positive result. By leaving the outcome to the court room instead, you're dooming them both to a win-lose situation. Mediation, on the other hand, could provide the best
long term optimal solution.
And this is just the problem with the way our political system is set up: it's based on the short term. The fact that Presidents even have agendas is, in some respects, indicative of this. They are coming in for a duration of four or maybe eight years to ramrod whatever interests they may be getting paid for through the Congess. There is little natural incentive set up for compromise at all, really.
So what am I round-about working to here? Well, entertain me for a second and imagine a mediation-based government where non-partisan professionals who were taught and certified mediated everything from Congressional hearings to bi-partisan meetings. Imagine an amendment to our country's government that mandates that the entire system strive for conservation - and when I say
conservation, I mean it in the most general sense - be it financial, environmental, or military.
I understand that risk is always involved in reward, but it's been proven over and over again that a long-term conservative stance can often get the job done
better and with
less risk than a patchwork of short term reactionary decisions. If that sounds like a quote from an investing guide, than you caught me; that's my first example. Warren Buffet is an incredibly rich man because he practiced conservative investing, aka value investing. He believes strongly in tried-and-true practices like dollar cost averaging. He is
extremely rich.
I am not an economist nor a political scientist, strategist, or theorist and I'll admit that up front, but there are some things that seem almost too obvious to see. While governments love to grow their economies (and sometimes population, a form of capital) and it certainly can help to improve the overall living standards of its people, it creates a series of fits and starts, booms and busts. Economies are not objects in motion and they don't tend to maintain velocity unless otherwise acted upon. There will always be bulls and there will always be bears, but I believe a wiser government could capitalize on the long haul approach.
Imagine a government that underspends. Imagine a government that over-taxes, if only slightly, for the rainy day fund. Imagine a Social Security system that was never in trouble. While this might start to sound socialist, let me remind you of our founding motto: Of the people, By the people, and
For the people. Even though nobody wants to pay more taxes, it is the job of our government to look out for our best interests, and protect us from our bad individual decisions. The welfare system exists to help those who can not help themselves. The social security system is similar. Unemployment as well. Then is it such a horrible idea that the government could
act like it is working for
our best interests? A more fiscally conservative government would perhaps slow growth over the long term, but this returns us to Warren Buffet's sage advice to invest a little bit, and do it very often. What we do instead, in government and individually as well, is react. Reacting is especially dangerous because the first system in line that controls our reactions is
emotion. Playing the market can really get you going, but it rarely ends better than a long-term conservative approach
over the long term. It is hard to see the forest through all those trees, because when you have your own huge green money tree (if only on paper) that money tree hides the real goal.
Now let me take the conservative financial analogy to the environment, consider a world in which the 70's oil scare made a more conservative America begin to invest large amounts of capital into alternative energy. While expenditure hurts and the technology then was a fraction of what it is now, old alternative technology is better than none. Technology is generally a ladder - you must rise one step at a time. A great example of this (and some may argue with me here) is the amazing difference there is between today and thirty years ago in terms of environmental pollution in our country. While isolated atrocities exist, like strip mining sites, we are overall pouring less chemicals in our rivers and lakes and being far more mindful of our environment. If that comment makes you laugh than stop a second and remember how truly bad it was. In my hometown, the Kennebec River - second largest in the state - was so polluted that it would
peel the paint off the houses near the river. Outside of hippy enclaves, there was limited
recycling on the scale we see today and nearly everyone threw their beer cans away. It wasn't until 1972 that the first bottle deposit law was passed in Oregon (see the excellent
History of Recycling PDF).
We've come a long way baby. But we're continuing to allow our emotion to drive our political decisions and this is exactly what I think we have a chance to fix. Evolutionarily, our emotions are lower down the chain than our ability to reason and think logically. Chimps have emotions. Gerbils have emotions. Let me say that again:
Gerbils have emotions. Emotions are a hop skip and a jump from instinct and, while I mentioned before that there is some intuitive benefit from it, logical wins the end game. At least for now.
(Sidenote: The excellent (if dry)
Your Money & Your Brain by Jason Zweig speaks to this. While it is a book extolling the virtues of index fund investing, it does so through careful analysis of what we know about how the human brain works. Reacting to emotion in investing is a sure way to get burnt.)
While I probably haven't bothered to write this well and I've said a fraction of what I'd like to if my little puppies weren't so sick of tapping on the 'ol keyboard, I think you get my drift here. We need a long term approach and I'm not talking about your kids, I'm talking about everyone who will ever carry any part of your DNA in the future, as well as mine, and everyone else that lives in this country. We need a government in which the future's children are
first class citizens in everything we do
now, giving them full voting rights (if only exercised in our minds, when we remember to consider them in everything we choose). We need a country in which the environment is a first class citizen - it is one of our top resources. We need a country in which its
citizens are first class citizens because human resource is the greatest resource of them all.
The best way to protect the interests of multiple parties in a small claims court situation is through mediation. By "protect", I mean to say "come to the most reasonable solution". While neither party may get the best they could have gotten if they rolled the dice and took a chance (aka, a risk) both parties got something. A mandate of mediation and conservation in our government could transform us, as a nation, into a profitable society. While a conservative long-term approach reduces risk, so does a mediation strategy. Get what you can, a little bit, often. A society where a stronger base provides for less reliance on foreign interests is a society that can weather ups and downs with less turbulence, rely less on fear and speculation, and prosper in the long term. A society where rights are more respected is a society where its citizens remain
first class citizens. A society where there is less fear (the most destructive emotion of them all) is a society that does a whole lot less
reacting
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
the guys: philogynist jaime tony - the gals:raymi raspil
